Forgive me if this has been posted before, but I felt the need to talk about this. I was just rewatching Chamber of Secrets and I got to the part where Harry and Ron get the paper from Hermione about the basilisk.

Now the information they learned from the paper always seemed to confuse me as a child. Spiders being afraid of the basilisk never made sense to me before. Maybe because spiders always frightened me more than snakes.

But I had an epiphany while watching yesterday. They fear the basilisk because looking it in the eyes causes instant death, and spiders have multiple eyes that they can't close. I literally facepalmed once I realized it was so obvious.

I'm sure that most of you probably already figured this out, but the lightbulb moment I had when I pieced it together was incredible.